Besides quarterly reviews
passing conversations
Monthly safety meetings
How often do you have a sit down talk with your employees?
Dealing with a few odd issues that I have never dealt with in 15 years currently. I have zero problem tracing every negative thing back to me; but geez.
The only way I see that I could have prevented these issues is to have a sit down, documented discussion with each and every employee once a month.
I can’t answer the question from being an owner as I am a solo operator for now.
But when I was employed we never had one on one sit downs with management. Only when some one was about to quit or something went really wrong on a job.
If you mean “Marlon Brando/Offer You Can’t Refuse” dead serious, type meetings…?
Twice per year June (gives time to adjust during busy season) and Jan (analyze Summer/Busy season performance)
I have a mountains worth of changes which need to be made this year. One of them is “communication” in every single sense of the word.
Maybe your answer is in the last 10 words of your post…
Communication is very important, it keeps “everyone” on the same page.
Hope this helps.
the smartest guys i ever asked about this either answered “bi-monthly” or “weekly” with the whole team. one of them suggested a bi-monthly 1 hour meeting early in the morning before leaving for the field. material prepared by you in advance, with an agenda emailed to everyone a couple of days beforehand.
subjects covered on a rotating basis:
-safety
-customer satisfaction
-current needs
-upsell training
the thing about meetings:
if you are having meetings to address issues that are arising, you’re doing it wrong.
if you are having meetings to stay ahead of issues that may arise, you are doing it right.
reactionary=bad; proactive/anticipatory=good
…all of the above is yet another thing I suck at…
if I had employees I would do them every Monday morning for about 10-15 min .
Edit : sorry , do you mean one on one or all of them together ?
Right now I just have my two leads so we don’t do anything formal. If something needs to be discussed I just talk to them before they head out real quick. Once spring comes and we have assistants, part timers, etc. Usually once a month. There just usually isn’t enough info to cover stuff weekly.
The company I worked for when I started had weekly safety meetings on Monday morning. We would all get to the shop around 6am, clean the trucks, load up supplies for the week, discuss any issues from the previous week and discuss a safety topic.
“Besides quarterly reviews
passing conversations
Monthly safety meetings
How often do you have a sit down talk with your employees?”
I could be wrong but I think he is talk along the lines of checking in on moral and attitude at work and toward company of each person. Sounds like maybe asking if we are keeping up with company culture.
Right. Ok. I talk to them everyday.
From observing several friends who operate very large operations… they meet with employees very regularly (atleast Bi-Weekly). We are to the point where training and communication is ongoing and key as we scale… so we are trying to do the same. I have made many mistakes by assuming crew leaders are handling jobs ok instead of having constant communication whether its a one on one review or a quick 30 min crew meeting every 2 weeks.
At the company I worked before every fortnight we would receive our pay slips with a company news letter attached to it, every employee received one and it touched a a few issues or up coming jobs or who did well a a particular job usually with a fortnightly award given to 1 of the staff who went above and beyond. As an employee it was a positive thing as you felt like you were kept in the loop.
The boss would normally have a sit down with each guy 1 on 1 once a year.
I guess it depends on the size of the company, the company I worked for has the boss, then the operations manager then 5 or 6 supervisors and 25 regular employees.
The boss was not a window cleaner, so the operations manager was the go to technical guy.
